Posts Tagged ‘SEO’

The many small businesses required online marketing far more than their larger corporate brothers. The big guys can swing fat SEO budgets around as they “explore” unlike social media outlets and “experiment” with social engagement as an change customer service strategy.

A small business owner who has been around for a while is often particularly distressed with the migration to online marketing. You set up shop, bought your yellow pages ad, and then had a modest budget for other media outlets such as radio, newsprint, fliers, coupons and perhaps local television.

1. The Rules Keep Changing

Last year’s large Panda updates were the obvious big SEO news. It was, as algorithm updates go, a major change that impacted 12 percent of Google’s search results. And SEO shop phones across the country rang off the hook from small business owners who were scrambling to figure out what it all meant for their traffic. And SEO is about as far from that as possible because the rules keep changing.

2. The ROI Calculation is Difficult

As much as the small business world begrudged the yellow pages for its monopolistic stronghold over them, it was a known quantity. In many respects, pay-per-click (PPC) ads corrupted through Google AdWords are the modern day equivalent of the yellow pages.

When small business turns to SEO out of desperation, they are looking for a gaudier option.
3. Fear of Ending Up on Google’s Blacklist

Step back for a moment and think about another area in business where the suggestion is something along the lines of “this could be a great long-term investment that will promote your business or it might take you down entirely.”

4. SEO Seems Overly Technical

Particularly in light of the risks related with hiring an overly-chippy SEO firm. But small business owners don’t have time for this. They can’t step away from their shop, store or van to take a three-day seminar on the conflict between on-site and off-site SEO. They don’t desire to know the importance of long-tail vs. head-term strategies.

5. “SEO Doesn’t Work”

The final, and perhaps most important, conclude that small business hates SEO is that it is often perceived to “not work.” Sure, sure, the comments section will fill up with statements such as “not if you hire me” and “not if you do it right.”

On a competitive keyword phrase you can be looking at years of effort to make it to position 1, if ever. For a Fortune 100 company with billions of Wall Street dollars at its disposal, this may be OK. But not on Main Street.

Small business needs SEO, but it feels like SEO has not yet figured out that it needs small business.

A good SEO needs to assist their small business customer see that the basic tenets of Google’s ranking system have been the same for years. Even as social signals are incorporated, and thin content is removed from Google, it will be in a assessed fashion with plenty of time to react.

Landing pages should be designed to make a prospective customer take action. The offer is a vital component of getting the sale, so make a big deal out of it.

Set the offer copy and matching call to action apart from the rest of the page to make it special. Use white space, a box around it, lines above and below and/or some sort of contrast to point out where the visitor needs to focus to get the item.

2. Right On-Page Brief and Call-to-Action

Your visitors arrived from somewhere, and an expectation was set before they even entering on your page. This could have been in your pay-per-click ad, a third-party blog posting, or a comparison-shopping engine.

3. Good Design and Reduce Text

Don’t use a wide different of font styles, colors, and sizes on your page.

Remove images and interactive rich-media content unless it instantly supports your conversion goal and is a clearly superior way of conveying important information.

4. Use Images Correctly

Images are good to use on landing pages to give a visual representation of the product or service as long as these following rules are followed:

Don’t make the image too large and too complex. Multiple versions of the same item in different colors won’t help. Keep it simple and clean.

5. Show Brand Marketing

People want to express an affinity for your product or service. By transferring recognition or good will from other orgins you can help reinforce their desire to act.

Social media buzz grows exponentially and also serves as a stamp of approval by others highlighting the value of an offer. Social buzz will drive more traffic to the page, validate your credibility and has the potential to help your website rank higher on search engine results pages.

7. Test Quality

There are many landing page that can be tested such as the use of a live demo, multiple pages linked by tabs, approaches to copy (sales, helpful, long, short, etc.), dynamic content, etc.

SEO is the main source of leads for sellers, both B2C and B2B, beating PPC and social media marketing in a recent survey of online marketers. However, more respondents say they plan to increase their marketing budgets on social media in 2012, ahead of SEO and PPC.

Whether B2B or B2C, both groups of traders agree that SEO has the greatest impact on lead generation. Credit 57% of B2B SEO marketing as their main source of lead generation, while 41% of B2C marketers said the same thing.

On the B2B side, a third said that SEO has most of its budget. But in the B2C side, over 42 percent say that PPC gets most of its budget – nearly double the number of vendors who said B2C SEO is higher budgetary allocation.

Overall, 60 percent of respondents said they plan to increase its budget for social media marketing in 2012, and 53 percent plan to increase its budget for SEO and 40 percent will increase your PPC budget.

Increases in media costs are ground for another couple of statistics from the survey: 68 percent say they have generated leads, whether Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, while 55 percent have closed agreements the media drive.

Understanding what makes a good link is probably the most tangible thing to understand for any SEO learning, since much of what he has “the potential to provide visitors with relevant,” it is common sense and sight.

Knowing what makes an “OK” link or a link to “strategic” require more experience and comfort with the analysis of backlink profiles, expected to be accelerated by this easy rule.

* Visitors are relevant from the target geolocation

* To provide visitors with relevant, a site must have a hearing

* Visitors should have exposure relevant to the subject content similar to yours